Ms Rachel Ramsey

PhD Linguistics

Research project: The semantics of English spatial prepositions

The focus of my research is the study of certain aspects of the psychological status of the senses of polysemous words. I use sentence-sorting tasks to examine on the extent to which word senses are shared amongst native speakers of English, and whether or not word senses are stored in memory, or constructed on the fly. I use agreement statistics to measure inter- and intra-participant agreement, and am exploring whether network visualisation, an approach more commonly used in complex systems theory, are a suitable means of studying word sense relations and their mental representation.

When I’m not studying, I teach Cognitive Approaches to Language Acquisition, a level six module that studies the major milestones in and constructivist theories of first language acquisition. I also co-teach a level four research methods module, Doing Linguistics, with specific responsibility for teaching statistics.

I’m an active member of the Cognitive Science and Communication research group housed at Northumbria’s School of Psychology.

Find out more about my research on my website.

Qualifications

BA (Hons) English Language and Communication

Research Group

Cognitive Linguistics

Sponsors and Collaborators

Northumbria University, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences Doctoral studentship (fees and stipend), October 2013-October 2016.
Optimal Workshop generously provided a free license for OptimalSort to undertake pilot research

Current/recent projects

In addition to my PhD research, I work as a research assistant on two ongoing projects:

Language Matters (Northumbria University, PI: Prof. Ewa Dąbrowska)
Words Which Go Together (Newcastle University, PI: Dr. Nick Riches)

During my undergraduate degree, I worked as a research assistant on the Early Language and Intercultural Acquisition (ELIAS) project, funded by the European Commission.

Key Publications

Schelletter, C., R. Ramsey (2010), 'Lexical and grammatical comprehension in monolingual and bilingual children', in. K. Kersten., A. Rohde, C. Schelletter and A.K. Steinlen (eds), Bilingual Preschools, Volume 1: Learning and Development, Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, pp.101-117